Book of Fire (38 page)

The House of Commons, so the duke of Norfolk found, echoed with the ‘infenyte clamor of the temporalyte … agaynst the mysusing of the spiritual jurusdiccion’. An Act was introduced restraining the payment of ‘first fruits’, or
annata
to the pope. These were the first year’s revenues from an ecclesiastical benefice that the new incumbent traditionally paid to Rome. The bill was conditional and was first used to put pressure on the pope to grant the divorce. When this blackmail failed, it was put into effect and the revenue was paid to the crown.

It was now agreed in the Commons that ‘all the griefes which the temporall men were greved with should be putte in writying and delyvered to the kyng, which by great advyse was done’. The result was the Supplication of the Commons Against the Ordinaries. A petition was delivered to the king in mid-March 1532: it complained that the ‘cruel demeanoure’ of the clergy touched the ‘bodyes and goodes’ of the king’s subjects, and implored Henry to use his jurisdiction and royal prerogative to put an end to clerical privilege. Convocation made no response other than reiterating the rights and responsibilities of the clergy.

More was deeply concerned, and tried to organise resistance to the Supplication. It was a forlorn task. Henry would not brook opposition to his will from parliament or the Church, associating it with hostility to the annulment. When Convocation produced a more detailed reply to the Supplication, Henry presented the document to the Commons with the provocative comment that: ‘We think this answer will smally please you, for it seemeth to us very slender.’

A deputation of bishops implored the king on 8 May to defend their time-hallowed powers. Two days later, he replied disdainfully that he would indeed protect and favour them, but only on condition that all the legislative powers of the Church were ceded to the crown. On 11 May he showed Members of Parliament the oath by which bishops bound themselves to the pope when they were consecrated. ‘Well beloved subjects,’ Henry said, ‘we thought that the clergie of our realme had been our subjects wholy, but now wee have well perceived that they bee but halfe our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects.’ The imperial ambassador recorded on 13 May that, ‘The king also wishes bishops not to have the power to arrest persons accused of heresy.’ This was perfect anathema to More; with Anne Boleyn constantly pleading to Henry for lenience, it could destroy the campaign against the reformers. ‘The Chancellor and the bishops oppose the bill as much they can,’ Chapuys added, ‘at which the king is exceedingly angry, especially against the said Chancellor.’

Convocation surrendered to the royal demands on 15 May. Under the Submission of the Clergy, the clergy promised to make no new canon laws without royal licence. All existing canons were to be submitted to a committee of thirty-two, half lay and half clerical, and all chosen by the king. Effectively, the king was now the supreme authority in all ecclesiastical causes. A bishop was no longer the arbiter of heresy in his diocese. The ultimate sanction rested with the king and his commissioners.

It was too great a blow for More to bear. He put the Great Seal into a white leather bag and delivered it to the king in the garden at York Place in the early afternoon of 16 May 1532. ‘Chancellor More,’ a wag wrote, ‘is no more.’ A few days later, Henry replaced him with another layman and common lawyer, the malleable Sir Thomas Audley.

More’s resignation was attributed in public to ill health and the heavy financial burdens of the office. In reality, More went because
he was helpless to defend the Church. ‘Our savyour sayth that ye chyldren of darkenes be more polytyke in theyr kynde then are the chyldren of lyght in theyr kinde,’ he wrote. ‘And surely so semeth it now.’ There were ‘traytors’ at court, he thought, and the clergy in Convocation were ‘of theyr dewty so neglygent’. He retired from active politics, passing his time in Chelsea.

He remained as busy as ever in the campaign against heresy. The first volumes of his
Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer
were now published, and he wrote on as copiously and ferociously as before. He compiled his Epitaph, as was the custom of gentlemen of the time, which he intended to have carved and placed on his tomb in Chelsea parish church. It flattered the king – ‘the defender of the faith, a glory afore not herd of’ – and claimed that his own record over his years in office was such ‘that his Excellent Sovereign found no fault with his service, neither did he make himself odious to the nobles nor unpleasant to the populace, but he was a source of trouble to thieves, murderers and heretics’.

He apologised for the heretic phrase in a letter to Erasmus. ‘As to the statement in my Epitaph that I was a source of trouble for heretics,’ he said, ‘I wrote that just to show off. I find that breed of men absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses, I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be; for my increasing experience with these men frightens me with the thought of what the whole world will suffer at their hands.’ Heretics, he said, ‘have a passion for wickedness’, and he pledged that ‘all my efforts are directed towards the protection of those men who do not deliberately desert the truth, but are seduced by the argument of clever fellows’.

He had no intention, he told Erasmus in June 1532, of giving up the struggle against ‘these newfangled sects’ and those who were sending a stream of ‘every brand of heresy into our country’ from the Low Countries. He wrote the same month to ‘my most excellent and most affectionate Cochlaeus’, Tyndale’s old adversary
from Cologne days, thanking him for his letters, particularly one bearing tidings of the deaths of the reformers Zwingli, killed in battle in Switzerland in October 1531, and Johannes Oecolampadius, the first Protestant pastor in Basle, who died the following month. ‘I was glad to hear the news of their deaths,’ More wrote, adding that ‘they have left in their wake many very real reasons for being sad, which I cannot mention without a shudder … Still, it is right to rejoice that such savage enemies of the Christian faith have departed from our midst, enemies that were so fully equipped for the destruction of the Church …’

Old Archbishop Warham died on 22 August 1532. As a fresh fillip to the reformers, the king arranged for Thomas Cranmer to be elected as his successor to the see of Canterbury. Cranmer was the Boleyns’ man. He had been the family chaplain and his affection for Anne Boleyn reflected his hope that her influence would help him see through reforms. Chapuys warned of ‘the reputation Cranmer has here of being devoted heart and soul to the Lutheran sect’. He confirmed to the emperor that Cranmer ‘is a servant of the Lady’s’, his ironic term for Anne, and said that it was suspected that Cranmer ‘may authorise the marriage in this Parliament’. Cranmer was, in truth, more Lutheran than the ambassador or indeed the king supposed. He had married Margaret Ösiander, the niece of Andreas Ösiander, an evangelical professor of theology, while on a diplomatic mission to Nuremberg shortly before the royal summons reached him. He sent his wife secretly to England before returning himself.

Anne was wholly confident that, with Cranmer as archbishop, nothing could prevent her becoming queen. On 1 September, Henry granted her a peerage in her own right, as ‘marques’ of Pembroke, using the male style of the title, an honour never before given to a woman in English history. It was, perhaps, the reward for at last sleeping with the king. Chapuys said that Henry’s lust
was now such that he ‘cannot leave her for an hour’, while the Venetian ambassador soon slyly reported that ‘the King accompanies her to mass – and everywhere’.

It seemed safe, too, for reformers to assume that England was a safer place with the change of lord chancellor. It was not. Even out of office, More was as pitiless towards heretics as ever.

One of More’s victims, an unconvicted suspect named John Field, appealed to the new chancellor, Sir Thomas Audley, to right his predecessor’s wrongs. In his petition, Field described how he had been arrested and brought to More’s house in Chelsea by the chancellor’s servants. He was imprisoned there for eighteen days, eight days longer than was legal. When he was released, More bound him to appear in the Star Chamber a week later on the eve of Candlemas, 1 February 1530. From there, Field was sent to the Fleet prison, although no sentence had been passed against him or proof of heresy established. He languished in the Fleet for two years in clear breach of statute. Field complained that More often had him searched, sometimes at midnight, ‘besides snares and traps laid to take him in’. No copy of the English Testament or of other Tyndale books was found. Among the books confiscated from him in the Fleet was a 6s Greek vocabulary and, ironically, a copy of More’s own
The Supplication of Souls
, which More had dashed off as a response to Simon Fish’s
Supplication for the Beggars
, in which, showing his characteristic obsession with the fire, he wrote how the souls of the dead ‘in most piteous Wyse continually called’ for prayers and intercession while ‘the gay gere [clothes] burneth uppon our bakkys’ from the fires of purgatory.

On Palm Sunday 1532, two warders at the Fleet transferred Field to the equally dank Marshalsea prison in Southwark, stealing his purse with 10s in it as they did so. He fell seriously ill in the Marshalsea, and was delivered to his friends on Whit Monday to see if it pleased God for him to recover. Field was well enough to be up and about on his feet within three weeks. Despite his
resignation of the chancellorship, More arranged with Bishop Stokesley and the bishop of Winchester to have Field returned to the Marshalsea. Field assured Audley that More ‘had neither word nor deed which he could ever truly lay to [my] charge’. At last, still uncharged, Field was bound over and released from prison the following St Lawrencetide, 10 August.

Ten men had burnt in England since More had first become chancellor. Tyndale knew three of them well, and may have met two more. Next to the stake went his closest and dearest friend, ‘my dear son in the faith’, John Frith, a young scholar with a charm and grace that beguiled all who knew him. In his pursuit of Frith, More revealed all the fieldcraft – the use of double agents, political intuition and the intricate manipulation of rulers and senior officials, the sowing of bribes, flattery, and inflexible and murderous intent – that he brought to bear on Tyndale.

Frith was a survivor of the Christ Church fish cellar, the son of a Kent innkeeper who had been at school at Eton, becoming an evangelical after he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, as a nineteen-year-old in 1522. His first meeting with Tyndale seems to have been in London shortly before Tyndale sailed for Hamburg in 1524; they supposedly talked of the need for the scriptures to be ‘turned into the vulgar speech, that thye poor people might also read and see the simple plain word of God’. Wolsey had Frith transferred to his new college at Oxford in 1525. After his release from the cellar, Frith joined Tyndale and the English exiles abroad.

He published a short translation of Martin Luther in 1529,
Revelation of Antichrist
, which he had printed by van Hoochstraten at Antwerp using the false ‘Hans Luft of Marburg’ colophon. He was briefly in England in 1531, returning to Antwerp before More could pick up his trail. He now wrote his
Disputacyon of Purgatorye
, a treatise in three books in which he argued against More and Fisher that purgatory was a recent invention of the
Church that had no foundation in scripture. As well as his own writing, he helped Tyndale to revise his New Testament and Pentateuch. George Joye, who found him ‘ientle & quyet & wel lerned and better shuld have ben yf he had lived’, said that Frith worked on ‘tindals answers to More and corrected them in the prynte’.

Cromwell had mentioned Frith in his correspondence with Stephen Vaughan over Tyndale. The previous May, in 1531, after the king had abandoned his efforts to persuade Tyndale to return to England, Cromwell urged Vaughan to try to win over Frith in his place. He said that Henry had heard good reports of Frith’s learning, and lamented that he should use it to further ‘the venomous and pestiferous works, erroneous and seditious opinions of the said Tyndale and other’. The king hoped, however, that Frith was not ‘so far as yet inrooted’ in heresy that he could not be recalled to the right way. Indeed, Cromwell continued, the king instructed Vaughan to speak with Frith, if he was able, and to urge him to return to England where the king was minded to be merciful to him. If Vaughan got Frith to agree – and if he was careful ‘utterly to forsake, leave and withdraw your affection from the said Tyndale’ – then Cromwell assured him that ‘you will win merit from God, and thanks from the king’. Vaughan promised to do his utmost, but added that he was told that Frith ‘is very lately married in Holland, and there dwelleth, but in what place I cannot tell’. He feared that ‘this marriage may by chance hinder my persuasions’.

So it proved. Frith did return to England, but a year later, in July 1532, and without the protection of a safe-conduct from the king. His luck seemed to hold out. He went to Reading, where the prior of the abbey was an evangelical who had been imprisoned for a year after the Oxford arrests of 1528, but subsequently released on the king’s orders. Poverty, and disguise, belied Frith’s status as an Old Etonian and Cambridge graduate. He was arrested at
Reading and put into the stocks as a vagabond under More’s new vagrancy legislation. He refused to give his name, or explain what business had brought him to the town. As a result, he was not fed, and became starved with hunger. He pleaded with an onlooker to beg a Reading schoolmaster to come to him, so that he could prove that he was no beggar. Leonard Cox, a local schoolmaster and scholar, duly arrived and found to his astonishment that the ragged figure in the stocks was a fellow Etonian who could recite Homer’s
Iliad
faultlessly in the original Greek. Cox reported this to the town’s governors and Frith was released.

Stokesley and More got wind of this, and searches were made in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Frith was in grave peril as he made his way through London and on to Essex to take a ship back to Antwerp. A reward was put on his head and the roads close to the coast were watched.